Last weekend, I took Lucy to a park, where she discovered a track (小路) with large bumps (凸块) and sharp turns. At first, I thought Lucy was able to ride her bike along the track, but she quickly found that her bike was too low to the ground and kept getting stuck on top of the bumps.
Lucy looked at me with fear because she was still a biking newbie (新手). I tried to encourage her too, but really, I was thinking—this is going to be terrible. Not because I thought she would get hurt. More because I thought she wouldn't be able to pick up enough speed to balance, then get really discouraged, and give up quickly. I imagined her throwing her bicycle to the ground and then crying all the way home.
But I was only half right. Lucy did have a lot of trouble riding the bike. She couldn't find her balance. She fell many times. At one point, she almost started crying because other younger kids were getting angry that she was slowing everyone else down. But she did not give up. She kept picking herself up and trying again. She even took the bike off the track and into the main park in order to practice pushing off and picking up speed on a flat (平坦的) ground. When she felt more confident, she came back. Then she did it over and over again until she finally reached her goal of going around the whole track without falling once. Then she didn't want to leave, and everyone was cheering her on.
This was not a day that ended terribly. It was a day when Lucy learned that holding-on spirit pays off.
